Sooty Shearwater

The Sooty Shearwater is a small seabird that travels approximately 64,000 kilometres a year around the Pacific Ocean during it's migration for food (Roach, 2006). The Shearwater has it's breeding grounds in New Zealand but migrates annually to it's feeding grounds in the USA, Canada and Japan.

For a small bird, this is a massive journey and requires a high level of navigational skill in order to be able to reach it's target destination. Due to the fact that the majority of the migration occurs over the Pacific Ocean, the method of using landmarks to navigate can be safely ruled out as the prevailing method of navigation. As the Shearwaters are travelling at both day and night, they likely use a combination of the sun and the stars as their primary source of navigation, and due to the fact that there will inevitably be some overcast days, they will likely also use the magnetic field of the Earth as a secondary means of navigation. Despite all of these methods, a paper put forward by Shaffer et al. (2006) claims that the Shearwaters figure eight migration pattern is based on the global wind circulation as well as the Coriolis effect, meaning that the Shearwaters are using the winds to travel much faster than they would otherwise. This does make it much easier to navigate as the birds can simply follow wind currents to reach their destinations very quickly.